Cuba: Mass protests and a growing economic crisis
Cubans are crying out for democracy, said José Meléndez in El Universal (Mexico). In an unprecedented display of anger and frustration, thousands of people joined spontaneous anti-government protests across the island nation this week. “Down with communism!” they cried in Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of the revolution and the final resting place of authoritarian leader Fidel Castro. “Freedom!” they demanded in Pinar del Río. “End the dictatorship!” shouted a crowd in the capital, Havana. The spark that set off this explosion of protest is an economic crisis with overlapping causes: the collapse of the tourist industry amid the pandemic, a surge in Covid cases, the ongoing U.S. embargo, and a recent change in currency policy. Some protesters chanted “My children are starving,” while others looted the hard-currency stores where the lucky few with access to dollars can buy scarce goods. But the overarching cry was for political freedom: an end to the Communist regime’s one-party rule and its repression of the press and dissent. Patriotic Cubans have suffered “with endless patience” for decades, but on July 11, a date that marks a new revolution, “that patience ran out.”
President Miguel Díaz-Canel was quick to blame the Americans, said Carlos Manuel Álvarez in El País (Spain). U.S. President
Joe Biden did signal his support for the Cuban people, saying the protesters were “bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights.” And Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, son of a Cuban exile, has “stupidly called for U.S. intervention.” But this is an entirely homegrown uprising, and it has terrified the authorities. Díaz-Canel is the first non-Castro to lead the country since the 1959 revolution, and he has little popular support. Like any weak leader, he resorted to violence. “The order to fight has been given,” he said at the end of a televised speech. “Into the street, revolutionaries!”
Security forces and pro-government thugs were quickly unleashed on the protesters, said dissident Cuban news site 14YMedio.com. At least 140 Cubans are now missing and possibly in detention; exact numbers are hard to come by because “the internet and telephone lines are cut off.” Activists struggled to get reports to the outside world of the beatings they witnessed. Some said the police set attack dogs on civilians. The day after the protests, Havana was like a ghost town, patrolled by a heavy police presence. “The repression is as unprecedented as the protest itself,” said one Havana priest. Both the U.S. and the Cuban authorities are to blame for this convulsion, said Joven Cuba .com (Cuba). The “current health, economic, and political crisis that the country is going through” is largely the fault of a Cuban government that has failed to “ensure everyone’s rights.” Couple that with the “inhumane attitude of the U.S. government,” which continues to enforce a suffocating economic embargo, and even limits the remittances that Cubans abroad can send home to their poor families. What we need now is dialogue among Cubans of all political persuasions, “the opposition and the government,” to create a “prosperous, democratic, and plural society.”